Wednesday, January 04, 2006

The Rat Incident

I may have mentioned previously that the rural location of the house brings with it the addition of bugs of various kinds, but about a month ago I was surprised by something most unexpected. Perhaps you can guess already what it was.

I went down to the basement to have a shower (the shower is located in what was prevously a sauna), and upon opening the door I saw something brown fall down from the left were some towels were hanging. It quickly scurried away, and left me shocked. What in the world was that crazy critter?!

After having notified my father the following day, he looked around, and surely enough found a tunnel, leading from the the ground outside to the sauna. The rat had apparently dug down through some softer in the vicinity of a pipe and gone through the brick! Flabbergasting!

We put out a rat-trap, but not having any luck we thought the thing had been outside when the tunnel was filled up and blocked. But then I spotted it again some days later, confirming our worries that it was still inside the house. We put up a bigger trap in the sauna, one that was originally designed for minks, moving the rat-trap that was there previously.

It took a while, but it was finally caught in the rat-trap on the last of December, letting us start the new year rat-free. It had been baited with a piece of apple, and it when the rat had gone in it it had crushed it's nose and jaw.